I think there’s a major disconnect on that last sentence. You are, in fact, not both saying the same thing. The word “free” is a key indicator here. There’s nothing free about it when we’re talking $50+.
Of course there is, If you are talking about receiving anything in addition to what ANet was offering for $50. If a burger shop offers a combo deal of a burger, fries, and a drink for $4, and you demand that for no additional price they also throw in a pie, you ARE asking to get something for free, even if you are willing to make a purchase to get there.
What he said would have more correctly, as some others in the community have said, been interpreted as something more like “the base value of the package without a slot probably should have been closer to $40 or $45. At $50 it should include a character slot figured into the price”. Again, value statement.
That’s entirely subjective though. If ANet thought that the base value of their package was $40-45, then that’s what they would have charged for it. They charged $50, so the base value IS $50. Now you have the option of paying that price or not, honestly I cannot for the life of me understand actually getting upset about the difference between $40 and $50 in a product with a multi-year life cycle.
I bought a Surface tablet a few years back. It was a Surface 1, and I paid $900 for it. A month or so later they announced the Surface 2, which was a significant improvement for only $100 more. I was pretty annoyed at that, but at the same time I didn’t feel that Microsoft owed me anything, I got what I paid for when I paid for it, and that was over a lot more money and over a much shorter frame of time than someone who bought GW2 in 2012 complaining in 2015 over a $10 disagreement on pricing.
It actually isn’t the same, the base game was never sold on the premise of playing 8 different classes, only that it had 8 different classes to pick from.
And HoT isn’t sold on the premise that you will definitely have a Revenant, only that it’s a class that will become available to you.
Likewise, if you only had the five starter slots and never purchased more, then even if HoT gave you a sixth, that would still only be six slots for now nine possible classes. Well they are also adding the eight elite specializations to the classes. This is also a “core feature” of HoT, and yet if you have not bought extra character slots, you will be missing out on at least three of these specializations if you don’t delete some characters at some point.
They don’t owe it to you to be able to play all nine total elite specializations just because you bought HoT, they only owe it to you that these specs are available as OPTIONS, depending on how you use the character slots available, or buy additional ones. Just the same, they do not owe you an effortless choice on making a Revenant, they only owe you the option of filling any empty slots you may have with one.
Also, deleting a character is not “stupid” for everyone. It really depends on how much time you’ve spent on each. I mean, I have ten characters at the moment, nine of them at level 80, so for me, deleting one to make room would be a big deal, and from your tone, I’m assuming you have at least five high level characters, so deleting one would be a big deal for you as well. Other players though might only have 1-2 serious characters, and actually leave slots empty, or leave them for unused mules or key runners. Deleting a character to make a Revenant might not be a big deal for them.
And of course you don’t have to delete any characters. You can always buy a new slot with gold, it currently runs around 300g for a slot, which most players with five maxed out 80s could probably manage with a little effort. and if that’s not an option for you, you can always buy a new character slot with cash, $10 US, which is about an hour and fifteen minutes’ work at the national minimum wage. You have options, some completely free, some that take effort, some that cost money, but you have plenty of options. They do not owe you a completely effortless option unless they choose to provide one.
And for the record, $60 would not be overpriced for the core expansion either. It is comparable to other retail games that will provide FAR less valuable play time than HoT will. The Order 1886 cost $60 retail, and it provided maybe ten hours of play time, if you read and listened to everything, five if you blitzed through it, and most of that time was cutscenes. $60 would be a fair price, maybe not the price you’d want to spend, but not at all unreasonable considering the hundreds of hours I’ll be likely to spend playing GW2 between when HoT launches and when the next expansion drops.
“If you spent as much time working on [some task] as
you spend complaining about it on the forums, you’d be
done by now.”